green

Now this is something I can really get behind. It involves lasers (very cool) and killing mosquitoes (the only animal I wish didn’t exist… ok, mosquitoes and fleas). The idea is to stamp out malaria by tracking mosquitoes in flight by IDing them based on their flight/wing noise, and shooting them down using lasers. I […]

So I’ve got a lot of plants/weeds around my place, and I want to kill most of them… but herbicides are expensive when you start looking at buying gallons of it, and I don’t want my house sitting in the middle of a chemical soup bath either. Fortunately, the answer is simple; 1 cup vinegar […]

This project makes my little passively cooled datacenter project look like amateur-hour (ok, it looked like that before). The entire building was built for 20M$ back in 1965 to house a giant Van Der Graaf generator, but now it’s a pretty sweet looking ultra-efficient datacenter (pdf)! This kind of thing just inspires me because its […]

Last summer I posted about the possibility of using outside air to cool a datacenter. Soon after posting I set about building a proof of concept. I also started noticing a trend leaning toward things like increasing the baseline temp target in datacenters: Cloudrack turns up the heat Raise the temperature, fight the fans I […]

Living in a 1910 Victorian style 2 story home has its charm, but it also means a lot of updating if you don’t want to watch your house burn down due to faulty wiring or freeze to death in the winter. The old knob and tube electrical wiring has been removed and replaced with modern […]

The UK Telegraph is reporting on researchers from the University of Michigan that have created a vortex based power generator that can operate in water moving between 1 and 3 miles per hour, which is the average speed of the majority of moving water on the planet. The new device, which has been inspired by […]

I have two cars; a VW GTI 1.8T turbo powered mad machine which can get 35 MPG if I drive like grandma, and my Honda Insight which can get 100MPG if I draft behind a semi truck from driveway to parking space and back again. I caught this shaky image on my way to work […]

Over the years, I’ve come to inherit and keep watch over several server rooms for various companies around the Pacific Northwest. The recent heatwave got me thinking a lot about AC system design as it relates to server rooms. As is typical for small to medium sized companies, these server rooms have anywhere from 1 […]